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His ex-wife Ashley Zimmerman concurs. "You are now as fabulous on the outside as you are on the inside," she says. Dan wouldn't argue. He's a positive thinker now, full of can-do, upbeat mottoes and brimming over with assertive high spirits. The man whose favorite sayings used to be "Love is a joke" and "Sex is just friction" spends his time these days flirting and dancing. He sincerely believes that "your life is in your hands and you can make it better." His eyes, no longer obscured by thick glasses, thanks to LASIK surgery, are a striking bluish green. His weight is down from 270 lbs. to something approaching normal for a 5-ft. 7-in. man.
Although he has discarded his $10,000 hairpiece because the glue that attached it to his scalp kept peeling off and he still puffs Marlboros, Dan is on a roll. Some of the people around him feel run over, however, as he readily acknowledges. "People are sensitive to my changing," he says. Chief among them is his daughter Bonnie, 11, who thought of her old dad as a cuddly teddy bear and somehow doesn't trust his new svelte form and game-show-host good looks. Nor does she understand how she fits into her father's new romantic life with Lesli, a waitress who is 17 years his junior and has just moved into his apartment. "The time that he used to make for her or us as a family," says Dan's ex-wife, "is now devoted to the girlfriend. So Bonnie, I would say, is really angry. In her mind, he's dumped her." One person's empowerment, it seems, can be another's abandonment.
For much of her premakeover existence, Tammy Guthrie, 41, a mother of three in St. Petersburg, Fla., was a drab, weary homemaker in sweat pants and a T shirt. Then the Hollywood fairies intervened. They gave her a bright porcelain smile, a sassy California hairdo, a neck lift, a face-lift and, at least for a while, a bold new attitude that revved up her relationship with her husband Wally. "Our romance had really waned over the years," she says. Wally felt as if he were having an affair in the weeks that followed Tammy's return, but since then things have cooled. A regular date night quickly faded from the couple's busy schedule. Soon Tammy's fancy new hairstyle was gone too, replaced by a more maternal, down-home cut.
Karen Richardson has stuck with her new look and changed her eating and shopping habits accordingly. Karen, 44, an emergency-room nurse from Wilson, Ark., who hated her nose and always dreamed of going without glasses, corrected both problems, made some other fixes and arrived back at work newly cheerful and gregarious. Young patients who used to shy away from her because she looked permanently grouchy, she says, suddenly sought her company.